Exhibitions 2025

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The Saturday Man

Peter Robinson

Sometime in the 1990s, it became a cliché to say football was ‘the new rock ‘n’ roll.’ In 1966, however, the only new rock ‘n’ roll was rock ‘n’ roll. That’s how Geoff Hurst's World Cup hat-trick slipped by photographer ‘The Saturday Man’ because while some people were on the pitch, he was hanging out with Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and the Duchess. Back then, life’s rules were simple: you liked football or music. No one with any sense or ambition picked football. Football-like baths happened once a week, twice if you were lucky or had coins for the meter. But gradually, that changed. Yes, it’s the money, and it always is. Football turns vibrant and bombastic. LCDs blink out messages of love. The pitches dry up, turn glossy green as country club fairways, the players, tanned like film stars, now look younger, the crowds older (because they are), the bigger stadiums more like shopping malls, the toilets flush, the food almost edible.

Peter Robinson, MA (RCA), b 1944 in Englandborn in February educated at Leicester College of Art and The Royal College of Art.
He also shot sports events during his long career as a documentary photographer. These include 13 World Cups and 10 Olympic Games, not to mention hundreds of football matches in England and Europe from the late '60s to the '80s. His football images from 102 countries have been featured in over 50 books and thousands of magazines and liberally sampled by football social media.
The Athletic and The New York Times profiled him, stating, “Peter Robinson is arguably the greatest living soccer photographer.